First lets throw some light on the concepts of good, bad and evil. What we call as good is when one party irrespective of his own agenda chooses to do things that can benefit others or refrains from doing things that can harm others. Opposite of this behavior is bad and the extreme opposite being evil. But why is being good, good for us? Simply because when everyone behaves the same way, we can expect less destructive behavior from our peers and can live in harmony.
But are we supposed to live in harmony? Evolution, the force behind our existence, requires every life form to prove its fitness by maximizing its access to resources and competing with every other life form. The best strategy to maximize ones access would be to share when confronted with an equal contender and dominate others. Since no two life forms are equal (genetic variation) there are partnerships when apt, exploitation when possible and all the corner cases of evil playing out now and then. Just as expected.
The indoctrination of good, bad and evil by means of culture, religion, law, etc. tries to minimize this phenomenon for a sustainable society. But however hard we try evolutionary forces still reign supreme. We are just another milestone in the evolution of life and are meant to be superseded by better beings just like monkeys before us and the countless many before them. This is the way of nature!
But are we supposed to live in harmony? Evolution, the force behind our existence, requires every life form to prove its fitness by maximizing its access to resources and competing with every other life form. The best strategy to maximize ones access would be to share when confronted with an equal contender and dominate others. Since no two life forms are equal (genetic variation) there are partnerships when apt, exploitation when possible and all the corner cases of evil playing out now and then. Just as expected.
The indoctrination of good, bad and evil by means of culture, religion, law, etc. tries to minimize this phenomenon for a sustainable society. But however hard we try evolutionary forces still reign supreme. We are just another milestone in the evolution of life and are meant to be superseded by better beings just like monkeys before us and the countless many before them. This is the way of nature!
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I agree, but at the same time I believe that we have the ability to overcome this, our frontal lobe was designed by nature for us to be extra-genetic learners, rather than a slave to our genes. Our Developmental period outside of the womb is so long because we depend on learning from experience rather than from what genes tell us. If our lobe gives us that power, we should be able to unite as one race under that. It is our only option for survival.
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Of course our frontal lobe helps us to refine our approach and contributes to our intelligence and reasoning but to what effect? We plan elaborately by analyzing consequences to better serve our goals and our goals my friends are founded in our instincts. Its not my intention to sound pessimistic here but the life of every life form is spent in pursuit of its instincts, many life forms do this dumbly and we humans do this intelligently.
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When death is inevitable, why should we struggle and live till we die? If you subtract wants/instincts from your existence, life loses its meaning. If you mean we counteract our instinct to dominate, it would result in a placid society where nothing ever changes. We will stop evolving, our pursuit of knowledge will stop and we will eventually lose our survival advantage and succumb to the forces of nature.
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Hmm, agreed but not entirely. Instincts are dictated by genes, but Humans manage to change those instinctual desires depending on their situation. I look at life as one big experience, and that to end it prematurely is wrong, depending on the circumstance. The frontal lobe gives us the chance to choose a meaning or a goal not from a defined set written in our chromosomes but to pluck one from thin air.
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@Nicholas - Its true that we can pluck a goal out of thin air and pursue it but such a behavior would be an outlier if you consider a large enough population. Our major instincts are survival, ego and reproduction. On the other hand our minor instincts are conservation of energy, parenting, herd affinity, empathy, etc. If you examine any population closely you will find that almost everyone's behavior can be traced back to these. Very few people dedicate their life to unorthodox goals.
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@Praveen- Unorthodox to society but perhaps not to them. I agree that a main goal is survival, but I feel it is not as black and white as that, after all our brains add in the color.
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@Nicholas - We are not talking about the exceptions here but we are trying to understand major trends in behavior. I agree there are many colors to human behavior but in general our instincts are the primary colors that we mix and combine to form the endless shades of human behavior. Further to that, I believe humans are capable of learning and overcoming their instincts to a certain extent but our instincts still rule our minds in most cases.
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@Praveen - Ok, going general here, Humans are ruled by our emotions, polypeptide hormones produced in the Hypothalamus of the "R-Complex" which is the part of our brains that causes all hierarchical and dominant aspects in society and general behavior, right? contd..
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"As a consequence of the enormous social and technological changes of the last few centuries, the world is not working well. We do not live in traditional and static societies. But our governments, in resisting change, act as if we did. Unless we destroy ourselves utterly, the future belongs to those societies that," cont. (Sagan, Dragons of Eden 133-134)
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"while not ignoring the reptilian and mammalian parts of our being, enable the characteristically human components of our nature to flourish; to those societies that encourage diversity rather than conformity; to those societies willing to invest resources in a variety of social, political, economic and cultural experiments, and prepared to sacrifice short-term advantage for long-term benefit; to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathway" con
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..."fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future." (Sagan Dragons of Eden 133-134). He goes on to explain in that chapter that the R-complex is repressed in dream cycles by the frontal lobe so that Humans and other species can focus on learning from the environment.
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I hope we will see more progressive thoughts and initiatives in our lifetime. Ideas such as democracy, free markets, social security, etc. revolutionized our way of life. What's the next big social idea??
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Society is a fickle beast, but is stuck in a loop of history, I'm sure if we analyzed societal trends closely through history we could predict the outcomes of the future fairly accurately.
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You might want to check out this post in 'Philosophy for Life' - http://www.talkonomy.com/topic/philosophy-for-life/post/13706432181980
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@nicholas this reminds me of the "psychohistorians" from Isaac Asimov's Foundation books.
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@Jeffrey - YES - one of the best books to help understand the phases/evolution of society.
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@Nicholas re: history predicting the future, reminds me of Noah's Ark, and the threat of global climate change back in the AD. And makes me wonder whether there are 600,000,000 people (christianity) in the world, who by indoctrination since birth, have been led to believe (brainwashed) in their hearts, that it is possible to flood the earth, and it is possible for mankind to cause it. Cont...
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